Town Square

New twist to 'transparency' dispute

The simmering dispute over whether the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District should televise its meetings took an unexpected turn, sources revealed recently, after a Palo Alto attorney demanded that district officials turn over hundreds of e-mails and expense reports related to a June 9 meeting on the issue.

I'm not understanding why this is such a big deal. If anything, it feels like we're way behind in not having televised meetings. It's just a public record, and since meetings are open to the public, why the opposition? Hopefully, it would generate more public interest in the schools and the community for those who can't attend the meetings in the first place.

Why should it cost $1000 to televise each meeting? That is what public cable access is for. There should be no cost to televise public meetings and events. I'm from MA and was on a local cable access board which received 5% of the town's cable company revenue. The primary mission of cable access was to get shows of interest to the town's residents televised. We gave free training in equipment use, free studio and editing time, free studio van usage and fed our volunteers to keep them happy. The output was show after show of public meetings - school board, selectman, planning board, town meetings, football and baseball games, town news as well as many creative shows.
Get the local Cable Access to do what it should be doing - televising local meetings and events. I don't want the school to have to pay $1000 per meeting to be televised.